


Be the Food of Love

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Awkward Crush, Crushes, Cultural Differences, F/F, Flush Crush, Violins, cotton candy bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 00:55:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose attempts to alchemize a violin and deal with her attraction to Kanaya.  She gets some help with the first goal; for the other, she's on her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be the Food of Love

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for [Cotton Candy Bingo Round One](http://cottoncandy-bingo.dreamwidth.org/1660.html) in response to the prompt: _music_.

One week into their journey through the Furthest Ring, Rose wakes with an itch in her fingers and realizes she left her violin behind when she died.

She used to practice daily -- a routine kept largely in defiance of her mother's erratic schedule -- and now, though she has no one left to score points against in that particular battle, she finds an emptiness in her ears and hands that only music can fill.

Violins, she discovers, are maddeningly difficult to alchemize.

She is scowling at her latest failure -- at least the neck is reasonably correct, though the body of the instrument has been replaced by a rubber duck with five curly novelty straws where its beak should be -- when Kanaya leans around the edge of the alchemiter room doorway with a quizzical expression. Rose clamps down on the urge to hide her mangled creation. She has nothing about which to be embarrassed, even if the idea of Kanaya seeing her at less than her best is somehow more distressing than if anyone else had caught her.

"Hello," she says.

"Hello," Kanaya says in return. She smiles, awkwardly. Rose thinks she's trying not to display her teeth, which is absurd since her two classically gothic vampire fangs peek elegantly over her lower lip no matter what she does, and is also completely unnecessary since Rose has seen far more unnerving things without batting an eye, but is... oddly touching? Unless it's simply another attempt to set the framework of their relationship by casting Rose as a pitiful, helpless human, in which case she should--

Rose stomps firmly on that thought. She can't go through life assuming everyone is playing by the same rules her mother did.

(To be perfectly honest, she's not sure anymore that her mother was playing by those rules either. But that thought -- and its logical conclusion, that she may have ruined years of her childhood and missed her only chance at a true understanding of a woman who may only have been trying to protect and connect with her -- is too upsetting for now. She shoves it aside.)

Kanaya edges into the room, jade-green skirt swirling with each step across the gray metallic floor. Rose catches flicker-flash glimpses of glowing skin and alien joint structure as the fabric dances around Kanaya's ankles. She wishes she could see more, could run her hands along unfamiliar skin and feel how Kanaya's bones and tendons tie her limbs together, could learn where and how to touch to play human music in alien flesh.

Rose tightens her hands around the neck of her not-violin. Crushes, she thinks, are ridiculous. Especially when her ability to analyze her own reactions does precisely _nothing_ to give her any control of them, and her game-given powers are strangely silent on what path will lead to peace of mind.

Kanaya stops about two steps away from Rose -- not quite near enough to touch if either of them stretched out an arm, but well inside the bubble of conversational distance that mainstream American culture has conditioned Rose to consider comfortable. The resulting closeness feels vaguely invasive, but also not invasive enough: dissonance held in vibrato, waiting to resolve into a harmonious chord.

She wants Kanaya to step back or move closer. She's not quite sure which option she'd prefer.

"I see you've been making human cultural artifacts," Kanaya says, studying the botched creation in Rose's hands, and the haphazard pile of Dali-esque junk on the bare, metallic floor. "Um. I don't mean to be rude, but I confess I can't see what possible use these items might have. Would you mind explaining them to me?" 

Rose looks down at her latest not-violin. Her mouth twitches. Life so rarely hands her such perfect opportunities for trolling, yet she finds that she doesn't want to wind Kanaya up the way she would do to any of her human friends, or even the other trolls. Arguments have a pleasingly jagged rhythm, but there's something to be said for more classical modes as well.

"It's a failed attempt at alchemizing a musical instrument . I don't have the right code, you see, and so all my attempts thus far have produced nothing but misbegotten monstrosities," she says.

"Ah," Kanaya says, in the tone of someone who doesn't see at all but doesn't want to admit her lack of complete understanding.

Rose knows that feeling all too well.

"The instrument is called a violin. It's a set of strings stretched across a hollow wooden body; the sound is produced by the vibration of the strings, as echoed and amplified by the air within the body. It's most commonly played by running a bow across the strings. I managed to create a bow by combing a pair of wooden knitting needles with a two-mouthed cat plushie, but I can't get the violin itself to come out properly. The neck is correct on this one," Rose says, pointing at the relevant part of her creation, "but everything else is wrong." She sets it down on the alchemiter and picks up some of her previous failures. "I managed to get most of the body correct on this attempt, but as you can see it's embedded in a cut-glass bust of Troll Snoop Dogg. This one has the bridge and strings, but they're attached to a candy gummy beetle, which is utterly useless from a sonic perspective, and--"

"What flavor?" Kanaya asks.

Rose looks at the giant gummy candy in her hands. The tiny gouges where she'd stolen samples are barely visible, and yet Kanaya must have seen them. She wonders whether trolls have sharper vision than humans, whether Kanaya is simply an unusually perceptive individual, or whether her undead status has any effect. She wonders if Kanaya still has a heartbeat. She wants to press her hand to Kanaya's chest and find out for herself.

Crushes are _ridiculous_ , Rose reminds herself. She hardly even hugged her mother. Plastering herself over someone with whom she's only in the early stages of friendship would be inexcusable.

"Indeterminate citrus, with alternating bands of red flavor," she says. She turns, intending to set the oversized candy on the alchemiter.

"Wait." Rose freezes. Kanaya takes one step closer and delicately pinches off a section with her claws. Rose's breath catches in her throat as Kanaya slips the tidbit between her lips. The candy beetle is sticky against her suddenly sweaty palms.

Kanaya chews thoughtfully. "Hmm. That's exactly the same as Alternian generic red candy flavor. It matches no known fruit, vegetable, or meat. I wonder which of us included that in your universe."

Rose manages a casual shrug and pinches off a citrus portion for herself before setting the botched creation down. "Some mysteries may never be solved. In any case, I used to play the violin, but I lost mine along with everything else in my sylladex when I died on the Battlefield. I was trying to recreate it for, oh, let's call it sentimental reasons." She pops the candy into her mouth, then wipes her hands on her tunic, pressing the fabric down over her hips. She hopes the back half hasn't flipped up from static again.

Kanaya's face is oddly blank for a moment. Then she smiles again, somewhat less awkwardly. Her teeth are very white despite the shred of red gummy candy caught between two of them. "I understand about sentimental objects. I alchemized a sewing machine last week," she says. "Mine didn't survive my death in usable condition."

Rose makes an enquiring noise and inches closer.

"Eridan's attack shorted out large sections of my sylladex," Kanaya clarifies. Her hand drifts, apparently involuntarily, toward her waist.

"Ah. I'm sorry to hear that."

"However, my strife specibus was unharmed, which was the main point," Kanaya says. Her third smile is not awkward at all. It is, in fact, somewhat bloodthirsty.

Rose wonders why her cheeks feel overheated. She turns her attention back to the alchemiter and her pile of failed experiments. "I'm sure you would have managed even without your chainsaw," she says. "But back on our original subject, I don't suppose you have any tips on extracting and combining the functional parts of these codes while omitting the unwanted objects? Your game session lasted much longer than mine. You must have had more experience with this technology."

"Applied mathematics and computer programs aren't my strong points," Kanaya confesses. "I always asked Sollux for help." She looks down at her hands, claws picking nervously at the hem of her gauzy, sleeveless shirt. "Um. Now that I think of it, this instrument looks somewhat familiar. I believe the John human--"

"As opposed to the John gummy candy," Rose says before she can stop herself.

Kanaya flushes a soft green beneath the shimmery white glow that constantly emanates from her skin. "Yes, I, that is--"

Rose closes the last distance between them and presses her hand to Kanaya's bare shoulder. Her skin is very dark against the bioluminescent glow, as if she's wrapped her fingers around a light bulb, and yet Kanaya's skin is cool to the touch. It's also very smooth and oddly non-porous: a bit like well-kept leather, a bit like plastic, a bit like the spent cicada shells she collected by the hundreds when she was seven years old. The trolls' vocabulary and god tier wings suggest that they're somewhat insectile. She wonders how much that evolutionary history shows despite their largely humanoid forms.

She suspects most of the blatant differences are things of a private nature, so to speak.

A brief image of Kanaya stepping out of her skirt, revealing glowing skin like the sun shedding a veil of clouds, flashes through her mind. She can't quite tell if it's a vision or merely a desire.

Sexuality is a terrible invention, Rose thinks. Romance is nearly as troublesome. The latter she feels secure in blaming on Karkat. As for the former-- the former, she feels-- that is-- she feels-- she could lean in _just so_ , tilt her head, open her mouth, and--

Kanaya bites her lip. Her glow dims slightly.

Rose forces herself to pull her thoughts together. "I assume John made some alchemized folly that included part of a violin?" she offers.

Kanaya latches onto the proffered verbal olive branch. "It was meant to be a rocket pack. Terezi offered to find the correct code for him and turned the task over to Sollux, who couldn't resist the challenge. I believe he had to separate the full codes for the other items in the process, and we may be able to find his notes -- that is, if Eridan didn't destroy them along with the rest of the main computer room and the future of my people." She hisses to herself, eyes tinting amber at the memory of her murderer. Her teeth are bared and very sharp.

Rose's heart beats faster, some tiny, scurrying animal part of her brain squeaking about predators and danger, urging her to freeze and hide. Another, larger part wants her to lean forward and bite, test her own blunt teeth against Kanaya's fangs, breathe words in the broodfester tongue to writhe and twine around Kanaya's eerie rage.

Instead, Rose squeezes her shoulder, feels the alien configuration of muscle and tendon compress under her grip. "Even if the notes are gone or impossible to interpret, we're nearly certain to encounter some version of Sollux in a dreambubble sooner or later. I'm sure you and I can talk him into recreating his work."

Kanaya makes an odd rattling noise deep in her chest, halfway between a snare drum and a maraca. The green flush in her cheeks deepens as her eyes shade back to their normal yellow. "Yes. Of course. I'm sorry. I didn't-- that is-- I'm sorry if I made you feel you needed to conciliate me when we hardly know each other. Normally I have much better control of myself."

"Normally one doesn't return to life after being murdered," Rose says. "I think you're entitled to be angry." But she removes her hand. She doesn't yet understand the trolls' romantic system and emotional categories in much depth, but she _is_ certain that conciliation isn't the quadrant she keeps daydreaming of.

She can't, however, bring herself to step back and reestablish any physical or emotional distance. She wonders if Kanaya will notice. She wonders if Kanaya will mind.

Perhaps if she keeps talking she can avoid the issue. "In any case, a search for Sollux's alchemy notes sounds like an excellent quest. What reward would you like if we succeed?"

Kanaya blinks. "Reward?"

"I'm given to understand that quests traditionally end with one."

Kanaya shakes her head. "It's your quest. I believe I'm filling the role of the helpful character who isn't an active player. You should receive any applicable reward."

"I'll be receiving a functional violin. But you're not an NPC. You should get something in return for your participation."

A kiss would work, she thinks. She's not a princess, but surely a goddess makes a reasonable substitute. But maybe trolls don't share that mythic trope. And she doesn't feel like a goddess, whatever labels and prizes Sburb hands out.

Kanaya looks down at the little heap of misfit errors on the alchemiter. She runs one finger along the strings of the gummy beetle not-violin, spreads her palm across the belly of the violin fragment embedded in Snoop Dogg's vitreous hair. "I believe I'd like a song."

She offers her hand to Rose. "Shall we go questing?"

Rose's hand is still sticky with residual sugar, still slightly damp with sweat. She laces her fingers between Kanaya's anyway.

"A quest and a song," she agrees. "Onward!"

They set forth into the gray, mazy corridors together.


End file.
